Vier kleine Mädchen

...Everytime you see the oscars, the movies about the holocaust win the awards. Spike's movie lost out to a holocaust documentary that year. And I finally saw it with my own eyes. Hollywood sucks. This movie should have won the oscar for best documentary that year.

The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 was sort of the 9/11 of its day. Its interesting this bombing was on September 15 only four days later. It was a crime that shook the nation and the world. Its still in the news! There was a man who only recently was convicted for his role in it. Spike Lee does an amazing job in bringing this tragedy back to us. In interviews with the families of these girls and various others. The one that got me is the one with George Wallace. I thought it was really pathetic the way he kept bringing his butler into the picture and saying that he had a black friend. If anyone symbolized the bigotry and violence in the South during this period, its Wallace and I think to show him in this was wrong. By the way, the song at the opening when they show these poor little girl's graves will haunt you for a long time.

I watched this documentary yesterday afternoon. I remember learning about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (its importance in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s) but I never saw how the effects on the people whose lives were permanently altered and not just from reaping the benefits like we do today. This documentary opened showed this viewpoint.

It brought tears to my eyes to listen and see the relatives of those four girls who were killed. Unless you have a blind eye, a deaf ear, and a hard-a** heart, it is impossible to not be moved when you see these girls' sisters and mothers describe that Sunday morning when Addie, Denise, Maxine, and Carole were killed. I could see the hurt in the mothers' eyes and hear pain in their voices when talking about their babies.

I highly recommend watching this documentary. Spike Lee did an outstanding job.

I was not born when the Birmingham church bombing occurred. I first read about it when I was 10 or 11 in a Reader's Digest story and for some reason the names of the girls stuck in my mind all these years. I saw this on HBO and it is one of the only films that continued to leave an emotional impression on me long after it was over. Especially the haunting last image of Denise McNair happily holding her beloved (white) doll, and the overwhelming sense that someone who should be in the world today, is not with us. The interviews with family and friends of the girls are what makes this documentary special. Also it does a great job of educating people about Birmingham's civil rights history up to the bombing and just how it took an appalling act of violence to wake up white America. Let's hope it never takes this sort of crime again to make us wake up to other simmering injustices.

Whenever I happen to be in a group of people engaged in a discussion on race, whether it has been inspired by something currently in the news, or by an article or even a popular show on TV or a movie, there's always at least one person who asks, "With all the progress that's been made, why do black and Jewish people still put so much emphasis on race and prejudice?"

To answer that question for those people, no matter how well-intentioned they are in their ignorance, Spike Lee has made this film. You cannot be human and not be moved by the terrible story of the sacrifice that these little girls made, nor the lasting effect it had on everyone concerned. In its own way, this story is every bit as important as SCHINDLER'S LIST, and in the wake of recent events--church bombings, racial profiling by the police, the dubious success rate of our penal system turning young black men into hardened thugs into corpses--it is more important now than ever before that stories like these are told, to help us understand why we can only change the direction our generation seems to be headed in, by looking back at where we've been and what it cost us to get to where we are now.